The worldwide trend to high participation higher education: dynamics of social stratification in inclusive systems

The universal desire for betterment through education

HPS of higher education are initiated, framed and regulated by states. Graduates are absorbed to a greater or lesser extent in national and global economies. However, the pivotal point where society meets higher education and drives its expansion is not public regulation or employer demand. As is further discussed below, though the social demand for higher educational opportunities is consistent and rising, the needs of states and employers for educational growth are partial and episodic; and neither agency intersects with higher education institutions on a daily basis. Nor is research the pivot, though it creates powerful global knowledge and sustains the social status and internal culture of elite universities. Rather, as first suggested by Trow (1973) in his essay on the transition from elite to mass-to-universal systems, the ongoing dynamism of higher education is powered by the ambitions of families for social position and of students for self-realisation. As Adam Smith remarked in The Wealth of Nations (1776), ‘the desire of bettering our condition… comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go into the grave’ (Smith 1979, p. 441). In contemporary societies, those desires, particularly the hopes of parents for children, have become primarily focused on formal education, which is seen as the privileged pathway to professional work. Family ambitions have no ultimate limiting factor and feed on themselves. Over time the social demand for higher education accumulates and tends towards the universal, as Trow predicted it would, and higher education provision becomes large, growing and increasingly ubiquitous.

Thus universal desires for social betterment are articulated through higher education systems that are themselves becoming universal. But the opportunities that education is meant to bring are not universal, not in capitalist societies that, regardless of whether they are low-, middle- or high-income, are stratified by unequal earnings and hierarchical power, in which at any given time, by definition, there is an absolute limit to the number of socially advantaged positions on offer. HPS of higher education can never bring every family what it seeks; and when participation becomes universal (as it already is in elementary and secondary education in many countries), at the margins of participation, students will gain no material betterment at all, though they may still gain forms of personal enlargement. In short, relative advantage is crucial. Socially, higher education functions as a positional good (Hirsch 1976; Marginson 1997) in which its sorting role is as important as the absolute opportunities that it brings. Starting positions are unequal and some pathways carry more value than others. Most families are deeply aware of this.

With families actively striving for position under conditions that they do not control, the formative effects of high education in society are experienced as a structure/agency dialectic. States and higher education institutions together structure higher education systems, stratifying the forms of provision and their cost and value. In the interaction between on the one hand structural forms and regulatory processes, and on the other hand the active agency of families—who have little scope to directly influence the forms of educational differentiation, but work the structures that face them as well as they can, in their own interest—higher education sifts and sorts the population. Its precise role in social allocation, which varies from HPS to HPS, determines the extent to which higher education renders society more equal, or reproduces pre-existing inequalities. Here HPS vary in the ‘slope’ of their stratification of educational opportunities, and the autonomous power of institutions to shape social outcomes. Though all families pursue their own interests, they may find themselves located within HPS that either intensify competition and tightly limit educational and social success or within HPS that are organised on the basis of equal rights and the common good, and enhance the scope for social mobility. Within the constraints of resources, and social relations of power, between them states (especially) and institutions can increase the extent to which an HPS can have equalising effects.

Yet constraints of resources and class power matter. States in many low-income countries cannot build inclusive HPS. HPS in very unequal societies, such as today’s United States (US), tend to be highly stratified, and strengthen not weaken the effects of social background in educational and social outcomes (Marginson 2016b).

Higher education in emerging countries

The most rapidly growing higher education systems include those of Turkey, where from 2000 to 2012 the GTER rose from 25.3 to 69.4 % (44.1 %), Albania (41.7 %), Cuba (40.5 %), Chile (37.2), Belarus (37.0 %) and Iran (36.0 %). It must be emphasised that the tendency to HPS extends to emerging nation states and has become integral to their emergence. China, India and Indonesia have three of the world’s four largest populations. In China, the GTER rose from 3.1 % in 1990 and 7.8 % in 2000 to 29.7 % in 2013. In India, it rose from 5.9 to 23.9 % in 1990–2013, and in Indonesia from 8.5 to 31.5 % in 1990–2012 (UNESCO 2015).

Drivers of growth

What are the drivers of the worldwide trend to HPS? The growth of participation is often represented as a function of the economic need for more skills and higher productivity in the markets for human capital. However, earnings are affected by many factors other than education (Piketty 2014, pp. 304–321); and beginning with Trow (1973), a succession of sociologists have debunked assumptions that participation rates are mediated by demand for educated labour or its value in rates of return (e.g. Schofer and Meyer 2005; Teichler 2009; Baker 2011). HPS coincide with economic modernisation everywhere, and demand for particular skills can affect graduate output, but total GTERs are rising sharply in HPS with wide variations in rates of economic growth and employment, and in industry/skill configurations (Marginson 2016a). While graduates enjoy measurable advantages over non-graduates, and often display unreasoning optimism about their prospects (Arum and Roksa 2014, p. 85 and 105; Hansen 2011, pp. 80–81), relations between higher education and work are fragmented (Robst 2007, p. 398; Roksa and Levey 2010, p. 391), the payoffs to mass higher education are unclear, and empirical evidence for human capital style decision-making, such as the use of rates of return data, is weak. Occupational status appears to be at least as stronger a motivator as earnings (e.g. Triventi 2013b, pp. 55–57; Thomsen et al. 2013, p. 471; Zhao 2012; Hu and Vargas 2015; Roksa 2005).

It is sometimes argued that the expansion of participation is explained by the credentialist strategies of educational institutions and the gateway strategies of occupational groups. Mass education institutions do have a vested interest in growth. But occupational licensing and credential structures vary, and supply side manoeuvres cannot explain a social tendency as powerful as HPS. Credentialism is a follower of educational expansion, rather than a leader.

In most systems, governments regulate enrolment levels, sometimes in the private as well as public sectors. The common sense assumption is that system size is determined by policy, funding and regulation. However, states seem to play their largest role in the first growth of mass higher education, establishing sites and funding tuition and living costs to build social demand. As Trow (1973) argued, once higher education is entrenched as the route to a middle class life—once social demand for the positional good has been normalised—expansion secures a continuing momentum towards the universal. Families want higher education because it provides opportunities for upward social mobility, or at least is a means of maintaining status and a hedge against downward mobility. It also offers students prospects of self-formation (Marginson 2014) and self-actualisation.³ As the frontier of participation advances, graduates maintain a labour market advantage over non-graduates. Though not all graduates have professional jobs when the GTER reaches 50 % and more, and returns at the margin of participation decrease, the penalties attached to non-participation increase. Higher education becomes a defensive necessity. Once growth starts to feeds on itself, social demand for higher education is no longer created by states, except among marginal social groups. In countries with tuition fees, middle class families are more willing to share the costs, as they cannot afford to absent themselves from higher education. With the growing total cost of provision, many states introduce or increase tuition fees, though some also focus on improving the participation of under-represented groups. As HPS expand, apparently win–win issues of inclusion are easier to manage than are the always-awkward facts of system stratification.

Despite occasional concerns about ‘over-education’, states mostly support expansion at the HPS stage. Why, given that the demand for graduates is not clear-cut and higher education is expensive? HPS are the global policy norm, the creed of the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), but this is not the driver, and nor is the economy. Rather, states are attuned to pressures from both social elites and growing middle classes who want better educational opportunities for their children. Some states respond to pressure from elites to nurture high-fee private schools and Ivy League universities, or maintain league table competitions in schooling that centre value on affluent suburbs (Dorling 2014, p. 28). Other states resist the rich and powerful. However, all states respond to pressure from below for educational expansion. Middle- and low-income countries achieve a mass-to-universal higher education system when that pressure from below become irresistible. This happens whether the nation-state is a contested democracy or a polity ruled by one party. In all HPS, it is no longer practical to impose an arbitrary limit on participation, as when higher education was a small elite system. Expanding higher education is also consistent with state political agendas. It is easier to create educational opportunities than jobs. It transfers responsibility for social outcomes from the state to educational institutions and families. UK and Australia even have ‘demand-driven’ systems (Kemp and Norton 2014) in which the number of publicly funded students is no longer capped—though the subsidy has been cut to manage costs. Cost transfers, from states with limited taxation revenues, to higher education institutions and/or families or graduates, are a common though not universal feature of the evolution of HPS.

Social demand for access is also magnified by the concentration of middle class agency in urban areas. Between 1970 and 2010, the worldwide proportion of people living in cities rose from 36.6 to 51.6 %. In emerging countries, urbanisation is driven by the movement from pre-capitalist rural areas to capitalist development in the cities. In China, the urban share climbed from 17.4 % in 1970 to 49.2 % in 2010, in Indonesia from 17.1 to 49.9 %, and in India from 19.8 to 30.9 % (UNDESA 2012). When the largest countries are arranged in order of the extent of urbanisation, and their GTERs are graphed, the line of best fit suggests a strong association between urbanisation and the GTER (Marginson 2016a). Projections of major growth in the global middle classes⁴ by 2030 (e.g. Kharas and Gertz 2010) imply corresponding growth in demand for higher education. This is not to say all people living in cities are middle class or that aspirations for higher education are confined to such persons. The location of higher education in cities brings it within viewing distance of the whole urban population.

Family background and educational stratification

The HPS trend increases the pool of graduates but does not increase the number of high-value social outcomes that graduates can reach, which is determined by relations of social power and equality/inequality beyond education. Expansion exacerbates social competition in education (Arum et al. 2007, pp. 7–8), and this in turn enhances the effects of prior social inequalities. ‘All else being equal, countries with a mass higher education system may be characterised by stronger competition among graduates in the transition to the labour market and, thus, by a larger effect of social background on occupational returns’ (Triventi 2013b p. 48). The same trend to HPS, which enhances equity as inclusion, also increases the regressive effects of family background on educational and social outcomes. Thus, research on the growth of participation finds that as systems expand, class inequalities in access to elite higher education and career outcomes are not reduced (Arum et al. 2007, p. 3). Stratification effects trump the equalisation of educational quantity through growth. ‘Qualitative differentiation replaces inequalities in the quantity of the education obtained’ (Arum et al. 2007, p. 4). The national cases in Stratification in Higher Education (Shavit et al. 2007) demonstrate that as higher education expands, affluent families dominate the elite institutions. Newly participating social layers are largely confined to the sub-elite institutions where participation alone is not enough to generate strong social outcomes. The exceptions to these generalisations are when social mobility is unusually high, as in the 1960s/1970s in the US when higher education and social mobility grew together (Marginson 2016b), and/or when a determined policy effort is made by government to match growth with equalisation. Only under these circumstances is the natural tendency to greater inequality corrected.

Why does educational stratification tend to reinforce prior social inequalities, and why does expansion naturally enhance the effects of social background, or make no difference? Here, the point about the growth of HPS being driven by family aspirations for social position—for higher education as a positional good—rather than being driven by state ordering, or the needs of the economy, gains significance. HPS are populated by families that apply active agency to the contest for educational and social success, at every stage. Families with financial, social, cultural or political capitals bring those capitals to bear on education and continue to do so in the transition to work and beyond (Borgen 2015). Oxfam refers to ‘opportunity hoarding’, whereby ‘social disparities become permanent’. Privileged groups ‘take control of valuable resources and assets for their benefit’, such as ‘access to quality education’ (Oxfam 2014, p. 20). The formal stratification of opportunities on the basis of institutional hierarchies and/or financial barriers provides points of purchase for family strategies. Whenever there is a hierarchy of value, families with prior social advantages are best placed to compete for scarce places or pathways that confer the greatest positional advantages (Triventi 2013b, p. 47; Lucas 2001, 2009). Educational differentiation allows the elite status of those ‘born into privilege’ to be protected (Arum et al. 2007, p. 5). HPS are regulated by the degree and type of selectivity and closure, within a common social regime of openness and inclusion. Social competition at the key points of transition and selection—entry to higher education, entry to professions and occupations—enables a fine-grained differentiation of the population, providing scope for stratified family capacities and strategic acumen.

Nevertheless, as suggested, this institutional reproduction of prior social inequalities is punctuated by moments (more in some systems than others) when policy, educational practices and student effort broaden the potential for upward mobility via education.

Stratification between and within institutions

The mechanisms of social and educational stratification are now examined more closely, before returning to HPS and social mobility.

Stratified structure and self-stratified agency

Although almost all families want to maximise the social position of their children, family agency is not a constant over time, or between countries, or between socio-economic status (SES) groups. Confronted by the stratified structure of provision, families respond in a differentiated fashion that reflects varied material circumstances and cultural sets. Whereas upper-middle class families may put great effort into achieving the highest possible position within the HPS, low SES and remote students are less likely to nurture high ambitions, more likely to be deterred by cost, more likely to focus on secure and predictable employment-related paths rather than diffuse intellectual formation, more likely to believe they lack the cultural capital to survive and perform at university, and less familiar with performance and application strategies. Self-stratification happens even in free Nordic HPS (Thomsen et al. 2013, p. 457 and pp. 471–474). However, all else being equal, stratified HPS with price barriers tend to evoke larger self-stratification effects, and are more likely to empty out degree completion altogether in the bottom SES layers.

National variations

There are structural variations in the high social mobility countries. Nordic HPS have fairly ‘flat’ stratification, high public spending and no tuition. Canadian stratification and tuition are higher than in Europe but more modest than in the US. There is high spending from both public and private sources, while public policy emphasises citizen rights as in Europe. In South Korea, high social mobility (Table 3) is joined to a stratified HPS with emphasis on elite universities, and high private costs in other institutions. The tendency of the highly stratified HPS to exacerbate unequal social outcomes is cushioned by Korean equality in income determination and regional growth (Lee et al. 2012), a school system that ensures all graduates have advanced literacy, and East Asian not European/American educational culture (Marginson 2013). The results of the OECD (2014c) Programme of International Student Assessment show that all East Asian societies place exceptional value on learning; and the desire for educational success runs so deep in low SES families that private costs stratify ambition, participation and completion less than is the case in Europe and the US.